


A Catalog of Non-Definitive Acts

by thescrewtapedemos



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Amnesia, Casual Murder, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-12
Packaged: 2018-01-18 22:23:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1445008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescrewtapedemos/pseuds/thescrewtapedemos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.”</i><br/>— <b>Richard Siken</b></p><p>He doesn't remember, not much, but when sleep edges in sometimes he feels a ghost in his arms that's almost warm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Catalog of Non-Definitive Acts

> if you want me  
>  let me know  
>  where do you wanna go  
>  no need for talking  
>  i already know  
>  if you want me  
>  why go  
>  - **stars** , the xx

* * *

The thing he has learned is that silence becomes your friend. 

He watches himself wander as if removed from his body and knows he doesn’t remember much. There are houses that aren’t totally leveled sometimes, empty and ruined and cold. He sleeps there when he can and when he can’t he pulls himself into a tree or under a bush and curls up tight. 

He doesn’t remember much, barely _anything_ but when he lays down to sleep he feels the sense memory of something small and bony and sickly, someone frail pressed up against his ribs and in his arms. It feels warm and innocent. He gropes for a name and comes up with a handful that mean nothing to him. 

James, he thinks, but doesn’t recognize it. Zola, he thinks a few days later, when there isn’t even a bush to lie under, and he doesn’t sleep that night. Rogers, he thinks at last, and decides to keep that one because it feels a little more right. 

Not quite his. 

But not nothing, either. 

He keeps on the move. 

Silence circles him and he likes it better that way. He sees camps sometimes full of dirty desperate people and they are loud and chaotic and make things twitch behind his eyes. Something cold and dispassionate, something that smells like smoke and disinfectant. Something else, weak and fluttery and painful. He ignores them both and stays away. 

The silence is better, he doesn’t want to know what’s in his head with him.

* * *

He is not always left alone. 

Once he is dragged from beneath his bush by the ankle, a trio of laughing men with thick beards and ugly, hot eyes. They stink of sweat and stale blood and they are better fed than anyone he has seen in the distant survivor camps. He thinks he would dislike them even if they were not kicking him, but they are and they haven’t noticed his knives or his metal arm yet. 

He kills them efficiently, with no pleasure and no regret. They have packs heavy with food and supplies he does not need. He barely eats and he doesn’t get sick. He leaves the packs where a group of survivors sleep in an abandoned school and moves on. 

He sleeps and dreams that he is on a cliff above a lake of fire and doesn’t know why he wakes up feeling so safe.

* * *

The weather doesn’t change as much as it used to. Some months are dull and hot and humid, pressing against him like a hand. Some months are sharp and cold and damp. The sun is rare and he forgets for a little while, maybe a week or so, what green is. It’s ten minutes of staring at a rotting poster of flowers on an abandoned wall before the word comes back. 

He’s losing more, more memories slipping through the cracks. He doesn’t remember the names for seasons or what country he’s in and he doesn’t think he’s ever known his own name. Maybe it should bother him but it doesn’t. 

He thinks that there’s probably nothing in his past he wants to remember. 

(It’s a lie, there’s something in the back of his head like a splinter, or more like an open wound.  
He doesn’t think about it.)

He doesn’t know how long he’s been wandering in this grey world.

* * *

His left arm is made of metal but he can move it like it’s nothing more than flesh and blood. 

He knows it, abstractly, accepts it like he accepts that he is a certain height and a certain (dropping, slowly creeping toward zero) weight and he can kill a man with only his flesh hand and his teeth. Facts, a basis unforgettable because it’s just like the way gravity continues even with no apple trees to prove it. 

His arm works. 

He is a certain height. 

He is a certain (dropping) weight. 

He can kill a man, ten men, twenty men. 

His arm works, until it doesn’t. 

It begins with the slow prickle of pins and needles under phantom skin. He bears it, scratches with splintered fingernails at the dull metal surface and whines quietly when the feeling surges and he’s alone enough in the silence to feel safe making sound. It subsides, every time, until it goes numb to the core. A creeping peripheral sensation of wrongness worse than the pins and needles had ever been. It makes moving hard, he can’t gauge where his arm is. He walks as far from people as he can until he adjusts again and he’s as lethal as before. 

Nothing scares him, not exactly, but there’s something in his head that tells him that he does not want to die. It’s not the cold thing and so he trusts it enough. 

He has a few months before the ache sets in, gnawing pain that can’t be real, must be all in his head. It’s twisted into his phantom bones and once it gets so bad that his eyes water with it. It’s not crying, he’s seen crying in the survivors and he’s woken with wet cheeks that maybe mean something. It’s worse, his body betraying him. 

He moves away from the people again, farther this time. Food is scarcer. (He eats less.) 

He’s safer and can curl up in rotting beds and chase the sense memories into his own head. Someone in his arms like a furnace made of bones. He wakes up remembering his arms are singular, one arm that can feel and one arm that has grown pain like a garden. 

He knows, the day that the pain has stopped. He tries to move the arm and it’s nothing but dead weight and he’s not really surprised. He straps it to his chest and teaches himself to move with the new hindrance until he’s operational again. 

He doesn’t know why he keeps coming back to the survivors, he feels nothing at all when he looks at them.

* * *

It’s been a long time since his world narrowed to the ground underneath his feet and a safe place to sleep and how long he can go without eating again. He does remember before, a little, remembers that the world was much brighter and louder and he was not happy, not _anything_. Remembering before is not pleasant and he avoids it when he can. 

He doesn’t have a precise memory of how long it has been since then but there’s the vague wheel of hot to cold that’s what passes for seasons now and the survivors are building again. Years, he’s pretty sure. Not many, but a few. 

The survivors are building, tearing down old houses and throwing up new ones and flourishing. He watches them and feels something begin to hum in his bones. He’s not sure words like boredom apply to this world, or to him, but he likes ‘restless’. He sleeps less and eats… about the same. 

The circles he wanders in get wider and wider and he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He’s aimless, purposeless.

* * *

It’s one night, holed up under the abandoned porch of an abandoned house in an abandoned neighborhood of a ghost town, that he finds something a little like purpose.

There’s a billboard across the road and he can’t read the faded letters but he can make out smiling people on a sunny beach under a patriotic flag. He feels _something_ shift in his head. It’s not the people, worn peach blurs with washed-out white crescents for smiles, but he almost remembers what the sun felt like and it reminds him so much of the warm weight of someone in his arm. 

He can almost feel the bones shift under his hands, the press of labored breathing against his chest, and now he has a goal. A mission. He doesn’t believe the beaches exist anymore, exactly, but. Maybe there is something there. Maybe it’s different than here. 

It’s a feeling he tentatively classifies as good and the cold thing in his head relaxes. He hadn’t even realized the tension was there.

* * *

The coast is in every direction, if he walks far enough. Basic geography. Funny, the things that stick in his head. He picks the direction of the faint sunrise and starts walking because it’s as good an idea as any and he’ll always know where he’s going. 

It’s settling, putting one foot in front of the other and going in a straight line instead of a circle. 

He sleeps under bushes again. It’s the same as before, a phantom memory of holding someone that vanishes when he reaches for it. He doesn’t mind so much, settles in and lets it come until he could swear that someone was there. 

He gets up with the light and presses forward. 

He’s not sure what his emotions are, feels them distantly or not at all, but it’s not uncomfortable. When the silence is deep enough he dips back into the faded patchwork of memories and dredges for more names for the first time since he found ‘Rogers’. 

He finds a lot of names, a lot of names and the smell of gunpowder and wet blood and snow. He wakes up three times in a row with wet cheeks and pain scrabbling at his ribcage. He stops looking and clings to Rogers with both hands. He likes the silence, he remembers now, because everything is dead in it.

* * *

The coast is oily water and more grey skies. He thought maybe he’d like it better or worse or feel anything at all but he stands on the crest of a hill and stares out across water deep enough to swallow him without a trace and he feels- 

He doesn’t feel. 

The cold thing in his head is tense again and snapping for him to do something. It’s closer to the surface now and he doesn’t know if it’s the phantom smell of blood on snow under his nose or the new coast or if maybe he’s just slipping under, finally. 

He puts the ocean to his right shoulder and starts walking again. The cold thing under his skin seethes and refuses to settle. 

He sleeps that night alone in his head and arms empty of memory and that, that he feels acutely. 

Funny, the things that stick in his head.

* * *

He passes through a city that says it’s Fayetteville. No bombs had fallen here but the bigger buildings have begun to topple under their own behemoth weight. The land is mostly picked clean but he’s not really interested in sticking around. 

There are too many people. 

They watch the man brave enough to walk down the middle of the crumbling streets from dim alleys and broken, boarded up windows. He would correct them, if they asked, that bravery is in the face of fear and he isn’t scared. They never ask, never approach, and he thinks that’s maybe for the best. For their own safety, or maybe for his. 

He feels more awake than he has in a long time with the cold thing moving in his brain like a caged animal. It watches the people through his eyes and tells him no, no, no. He doesn’t know what it’s trying to say and he doesn’t want to know. 

He passes through quietly and keeps the ocean at his good shoulder. His bearings, even if he still can’t name the ocean or the country under his feet.

* * *

Slowly the memories return, the impression of holding someone, warmth. He wakes once or twice reaching after something he can’t remember and it’s disturbing. Things are changing, inside his head, and he doesn’t like it at all. 

He wonders if going back to where he came from would turn back the clock, too, but he doesn’t think so. He can’t remember where that was, anyway, can barely remember a series of rotting houses and cold trees and damp bushes filing away in his memory until it all fades into mist. 

He keeps walking. 

Passing through towns, he learns, goes easy or hard. Easy means he walks in and then walks out without pausing, the most direct line he can take. He’s not sure what he’s looking for, if what he’s doing could even be called looking at all, but he won’t find it in these places of tiny groups of suspicious people. 

Hard means that he has to stop. 

“What’s your name.” the man demands. 

He’s in the middle of some little town off the cracked, decaying highway he’s taken to traveling on. The sign with the town’s name had been a charred stump of wood and he doesn’t care anyway, too busy staring down the man who had taken offense to his progress down the highway. 

He’s big, bone and muscle and no spare fat. His eyes are hard and he wonders if the man is protecting someone or if he just enjoys playing king. 

“Rogers.” He lies and his voice is cracking and broken. He’s had no call to use it. 

“Rogers.” The man repeats, and meets his eyes like he wants to make it a competition. “Where you going, _Rogers_?”

He pauses, for a moment, wonders if he should lie and if so what he could even say. 

The cold thing in his head whispers that he doesn’t have to say anything at all, reminds him that he has knives and the exposed rebar of the concrete buildings and a car door nearby and he doesn’t even need weapons when he _is_ one. He can take a man apart with his one hand and his teeth. The thought makes something roll in his gut and a sound echoes in his ears, laughter high-pitched and maniacal. 

It’s phantom. It means nothing. 

“Don’t know.” He says, the wait far too long but still all he can make himself do. The man watches him and his eyes are a little less hard, are a little softer and a little sad and the cold thing reminds him that this is weakness. He could exploit this, could draw the man in and then end this quickly, mercifully. 

“Well then.” The man says, and steps aside. “You ain’t staying. Move along, Rogers.” 

He moves along. There’s a bridge to cross, a city ahead, one foot to put in front of the other.

* * *

The next city is Richmond and it’s the same as Fayetteville, just bigger. No bombs had fallen here either and despite the pull of gravity and age there are still buildings so tall and close together the sun wouldn’t touch pavement even if it shone through the grey. People watch him, even more warily now, and it occurs to him to wonder if he is being recognized. The man with the dead metal arm, the fearless man. 

It’s a new kind of thought and more evidence he’s been changing. The knowledge that he could be recognized, even if he can’t tell if it’s for what he’s doing now or something else, something farther back and beyond where his memory fades, where it starts to smell like snow and blood. He still hates the changing because with it comes the cold thing in his head, closer to the surface. And something else, the tattered thing, weaker but infinitely more painful. 

He doesn’t know what to call them and avoids thinking about what he shares his head with. 

It occurs to him, as he climbs the side of a skyscraper that’s toppled over the main road like a monument, that he remembers snow. There hasn’t been snow in a long time, since before the bombs fell. 

He tries to forget about that and keeps walking.

* * *

He’s got a rhythm, two or three days of walking from the first sign of light on the horizon till his bones ache to remind him he’s still human, probably. He’s not particularly fast, sees no reason to rush. Then a city to walk through without stopping, each one progressively bigger and more people watching him with what he’s pretty sure isn’t fear. Baltimore is bombed, and Philadelphia has craters like a moon where buildings used to stand. It’s not what he’s looking for, if he’s looking for something. 

He doesn’t think about it much. When he does he can feel something shift in his head and he’s tired of thinking and the things riding in his head with him. He wonders, in careful moments when he’s too tired to be awake to process the thoughts, if he is losing himself again or if he’s looking for parts of himself he might have left behind. 

If it’s the second he knows he’s got a hell of a search.

* * *

New York grows on his horizon like a parasite and he couldn’t articulate it but something about it sets his teeth on edge. It’s a desperate hum in his bones and something is seething in his brain, he can feel it roiling under his surface. He keeps walking and measures his heartbeat to his footsteps for something to concentrate on. 

The bombs fell hard here and Manhattan Island doesn’t exist anymore, nothing more than a few square miles of spotty rubble and unsteady, rusting buildings. There’s a metal letter propped up on the highest point to catch the meager light, a stylized ‘A’ taller than he is. 

He stands on the shoreline and looks at it and doesn’t feel nothing now, not like the last time he had taken a moment to look out across oily waters.

There’s anger pulsing in his blood and he doesn’t even know _why_. 

He leaves the shore behind and stalks across the rooftops instead of the streets, looking for something. Anything, really, the desperation is a fine quiver in his hands and an extra half-second in his reaction time. Enough weakness to kill him, the cold thing hisses in his ear. It’s closer than it’s ever been and he’s too confused to know why that scares him. 

Brooklyn is cleaner than he expects because maybe fewer bombs dropped here. There are people, too, tending gardens and building and living. It’s a new thing and for a moment he wonders if that’s what he’s looking for but the desperate anger is still a drumbeat in his head. He moves on, crossing streets on random impetuous and sitting for hours at a time, watching. 

They wave to each other with the easy trust of neighbors and he doesn’t understand it.

* * *

He stays, for once. The need doesn’t abate but he learns to manage the hindrance like all the ones before. He stays out of sight and he’s pretty sure no one knows he’s there. No one comes to look for him, anyway, and his nest is hard enough to find that he feels safe. 

He sleeps more, remembers holding someone warm and infinitely breakable, doesn’t dream. It’s not enough and all he has. 

When it’s not light out and he can’t sleep any more he goes out. Some nights he finds food but more often he wanders on rooftops that feel more familiar with every step, and isn’t that strange. His memory is better, maybe he’s better at holding on to them. 

When he moves he feels his pulse in his veins like the need is foreign to his body and it’s killing him that he doesn’t even know what it’s for. 

He sleeps, doesn’t dream.

* * *

He fucked up. 

He stares down the business end of an honest-to-god arrow and wishes, for the first time that he can actually bring to mind, that he had a gun. He knows, or the cold thing in his ear tells him, or maybe he remembers that he was deadly with them. He doesn’t think he’s going to survive this without one and he still doesn’t really want to die. 

“Who are you?” the blonde man at the other end of the arrow asks and he sounds friendly, like a viper or a tiger. He’s not fooling anyone. 

“Rogers,” he croaks, and he has to fight it out harder than ever before. The lie burns this time coming out and the blonde man keeps smiling. 

“I don’t believe you,” he says through his smiling teeth. “Let’s try again, huh? I’m Hawkeye and I’ve been keeping an eye on you for a while. What’s your name?” 

Something that could maybe be fear strikes through his stomach and he looks away. He’d been watched and he hadn’t even known, and the cold thing was hissing in his head that he’d fucked up, he’d failed, and to fail was to die. Something settles in his gut that’s colder than ice, cold to a deep part of him he couldn’t remember knowing about before. 

He’s cracking, finally. Maybe he’d been cracking for a long time. 

“Don’t know,” he says finally, and it feels better in his mouth than the lie of the name had been. 

“Fair enough.” Hawkeye nods companionably and keeps the arrow on his throat like a laser sight. “We’re going to stay here, then, and wait for the Cap. He’ll know what to do with you.” 

He doesn’t know who the Cap is. Hawkeye’s eyes are ringed with dark exhaustion and stress lines but when he mentioned the Cap it smoothed for a moment, and maybe that’s encouraging, he doesn’t know. 

“Okay,” he decides. “Gonna… sit.” 

He sits slowly, not trusting Hawkeye’s fingers on the bowstring enough to collapse like his legs are demanding. His shoulder is aching under the metal plating. 

He drifts a little, in his own head, and watches Hawkeye’s arrow blankly. It doesn’t waver and there’s something familiar about that. He thinks there was a time he could do that, but he’s down an arm and fifty pounds and the motivation to stand. There’s something screaming about weakness in his head and it doesn’t sound like his own voice anymore but he agrees all the same. 

The Cap arrives with the tread of someone heavy but graceful and apparently his eyes had drifted closed. He doesn’t open them for a long moment, drifts in the silence until the man called Cap coughs out a breath that sounds like a sob, inches from him, and he opens his eyes in surprise. 

“Bucky,” the man chokes out, and something soundless and lightless and more devastating than anything Bucky can imagine explodes behind his eyes. 

“Steve,” he says, dreamlike and far away, and then there’s nothing at all.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> title from the Richard Siken poem A Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out


End file.
